Share this

Read more!

Get our weekly email

Enter your email address

Protestors outside Place du Luxembourg in the run up to the Baku European Games. FIDH/flickr. some rights reserved.

On the fourth of July, while America celebrated Independence Day, OSCE representation in Baku ceased to exist. In 2013 Baku lowered the OSCE’s representation to Baku to a “project-coordinator” level. Now, the coordinator, Alexis Chahtahtinsky, has been forced to leave.

Whilst the choice of date
may have been coincidental, the Azerbaijani leadership chose the Fourth of July
as a deadline for the OSCE to close its office and leave Azerbaijan, with the
OSCE’s website stating that“…[O]perations in Azerbaijan were discontinued on 4
July. The OSCE remains open to other forms of co-operation with Azerbaijan”.

The OSCE’s closure was the
last link in the chain of shutting down US and/or Western offices by the Azeri
government. In 2014 alone, Baku closed four Western-affiliated offices: Radio
Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) Baku office (December
2014), Peace Corps - Azerbaijan (December 2014), International Research & Exchanges Board (IREX) - Azerbaijan (September
2014) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) - Azerbaijan (March
2014).

The British Broadcasting
Corporation (BBC), RFE/RL and Voice of America (VOA) have all been banned from
broadcasting on public frequencies since December 26, 2008. Ironically, this
was the same date that RFE/RL’s office would be raided and closed six years
later.

British Oxfam’s office to
Baku faced criminal charges in May last year. 2015 has not been any better: Giorgi Gogia of Humans Rights Watch was
barred from entry to Azerbaijan in March.

This leaves us with the
question: why is the Azerbaijani President, Ilham Aliyev, cracking down on the
last remnants of independent media and civil society?

Officially, Baku claims
these actions are necessary due to “non-transparent” financial activities of
international NGOs in Azerbaijan and their criticism of
President Aliyev. In a letter to the
editor published by the Washington Post, Azerbaijani MP Asim
Mollazade, who claims to be an opposition activist, surprisingly supported the
closure of RFE/RL and named it “no more than a mouthpiece for the personal
agenda of President Ilham Aliyev’s enemies.”

The unofficial story according
to analysts, however, is that that Aliyev has become paranoid about a possible
Arab Spring-type scenario in Azerbaijan. To him, these institutions are
instruments that may promote a revolution and threaten his rule. This was
evident when Aliyev’s top aid, Ramiz Mehdiyev, published a 60-page treatise complaining of
a “fifth column” of international NGOs. The paper was released just before RFE/RL’s
office was shut down.

In June of this year,
Baku hosted the European Games, a mini-model of the summer Olympics, which was
being held for the first time in history. The Azeri government’s “know how” in
hosting a sport tournament solely for the Europeans fewer participants attended
the Baku European games than the Olympics, this was not reflected in the money that
the Azeri government spent on it. The two-hour opening show in the capital of Baku
alone cost twice as much as the London 2012 Olympic Games opening ceremony.

Azerbaijani journalists
and opposition activists, who could potentially have criticised the government publicly
over the European Games, were jailed in the run up to June. According to
various estimates, close to 40 journalists, bloggers and human rights activists
were jailed in 2014.

Those international journalists who
could potentially report on the games in a critical manner, such as Owen
Gibson from The Guardian, were not
allowed to cross the border. Gibson had already been
to Baku last year and ostensibly “exposed” himself to the Azeri leadership by reporting on corruption and the crackdown
on civil liberties.

Apart from the worrying deterioration
in human rights, there is another pressing issue that Azerbaijan currently
faces: the Nagorno-Karabakh (NK) conflict. The problem of Nagorno-Karabakh
dates back to the 1920s, when dictator Joseph Stalin put this region, together
with its 95% Armenian population and millennia old Christian-Armenian heritage,
under Soviet Azerbaijan’s rule.

When the U.S.S.R. began to crumble in 1988, the
dispute resulted in a war between the Armenians and Azerbaijanis. The
Nagorno-Karabakh Republic proclaimed independence in 1991 and a ceasefire was
signed in 1994. The negotiations, conducted through the OSCE's Minsk Group, are
still ongoing, however.

So why is Azerbaijan’s
attack on liberties so damaging to the Nagorno-Karabakh peace process?

Firstly, the message that
the international community hears from president Aliyev’s regime with regards
to Nagorno-Karabakh is more war mongering than constructive dialog. RFE/RL was
one of the few media outlets that was able to convey messages of peace but now
this important channel has been blocked in Baku.

Secondly, it is easier to
advance conflict resolution with democratic rulers than with dictators. For
instance, had the United Kingdom been an autocracy not a democracy, would it have
allowed a referendum for Scottish independenceand would the majority of the Scottish
people ever agree to remain within UK if the latter was not a free democracy?

The growing
incompatibility between the deteriorating democracy in Azerbaijan versus the
developing democracy in Nagorno-Karabakh has become a reality. The people of
Nagorno-Karabakh enjoy more liberties that those in Azerbaijan. Both VOA and
RFE/RL continue to broadcast in Karabakh, and no journalist has ever been
jailed there. Freedom House ranks Nagorno-Karabakh as “partially free,”
while Azerbaijan has been identified as
“not-free.”

Nagorno-Karabakh’s
exclusion of any subordination to Azerbaijani leadership is not only based on
historical grievances, but also because the growing authoritarianism in
Azerbaijan would threaten the advancing liberty in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Getting back to the fourth of July,
the day when the Azeri government expelled another international institution
from the country, one may recommend to the Azeri government the statement of founding
father Thomas Jefferson: “Our liberty depends
on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost."

This was true for America
239 years ago is also true today for Azerbaijan.

If you enjoyed this article then please consider liking Can Europe Make it? on Facebook and following us on Twitter @oD_Europe

Comments

This article is published under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. If you have any
queries about republishing please
contact us.
Please check individual images for licensing details.